If you want to stay away from installing SharePoint on your client OS
(Windows 7) but still develop cutting edge solutions, webparts etc for a SharePoint server running on a different VM.
You can just open up Visual Studio without firing up a VM and
code!
Here's a trick to that: Put the
SharePoint assemblies on your local machine and make my own SharePoint Root (aka “14
folder”) on my Windows 7 machine. It’s easy enough, but maybe you want to check
the differences between different releases (RTM, SP1, CU’s, etc).
You can use PowerShell to extract all the DLL’s from the SharePoint Root
folder and put them in a place I keep documentation, snippets, etc on my
machine. For example, I’ll have a folder that looks like this:
c:\Dev\Ref\SharePoint\14 (4762.1000 –
RTM)\
Try to include only the DLL’s because the SharePoint Root is huge.
For SharePoint
2010 RTM, just the DLLs are about 60MB. Go to the place where the SharePoint Root
is when it’s installed and add a symbolic link that points
to it like this (from an administrator command prompt):
c:\[Path to Web Server
Extensions]]>mklink /d 14 “c:\Dev\Ref\SharePoint\14 (4762.1000 –
RTM)”
Now navigate to the 14 folder and go to the same place where you find it
on an installed machine. If you want to
switch to something like SP1, then you copy those same assemblies and recreate
the 14 link to point to the new folder.
Enjoy the ease of developing without any admin :)